The former, who runs global advertising agency behemoth WPP, is presumably interested in the potential for aggregating such journalism and generating advertising revenue around it. I imagine he is thinking of the Channel 4 rather than the BBC model in the UK.

The latter is more concerned with the conditions under which an independent public sphere may flourish, with a focus on the US and a conviction, more a legacy of Bourdieu/Durkheim than Habermas/Weber, that the state is the most appropriate guarantor of this independence. Accordingly Benson attaches diversity to his call for quality and asks: “What are the laws and regulations and tax breaks and subsidies – in short the rules of the game guaranteed by the state through democratic political processes – that nudge and prod and encourage journalism to more closely meet ideals of deliberative democracy?”

Despite the different agendas and leaving aside the tricky issue of what exactly constitutes quality and diversity, as an occasional (and I would like to think quality) journalist who doesn’t object to (quality – do your bit too Sir Martin) advertising, I look forward to the time when they find eachother and harness Benson’s ideas to Sorrell’s talent for promotion.

Friday, 24 June 2011

I won't inflict a picture of a horse in a field on you, dear reader, but I will inflict my picture of someone taking a picture of someone taking a picture of someone taking a picture of a horse. Which is slightly more interesting because it means I can cite it as an example Bolter and Grusin's notion of remediation in practice (in 'Remediation: Understanding New Media').

What seems to be going on here, kind of, is the logic of immediacy and the logic of hypermediacy, all at once. The former uses digital applications to remove the sense of the media and reach ‘an immediate (and
hence authentic) emotional response’ (p53), while the latter’s use of digital hypermedia ‘seek the real by multiplying mediation’ (p53).

Those other pictures/films have already made it into the ether. The first aims to give the viewer a first hand encounter with the subject: http://bit.ly/jERHNw whilst the rest are more 'knowing' in showing how the first was produced: http://bit.ly/j3Xz5C (although the second could have made it more straightfoward for me to squeeze a theoretical point out of this experience by displaying the first video as it appeared on the MyFarm website).

Thursday, 16 June 2011

What does a pregnant shire horse called Queenie have in common with a German hamster called Hans? Both are Internet webcam stars, in Hans' case for 10 years although the excuse to explain his different appearance roughly every two years (that he "changed his coat overnight") doesn't wash with me any more. Queenie is a main draw over at MyFarm, an experiment in open source farming run by the National Trust. As I write she is expected to give birth and has a live webcam in her stable to catch the moment.

As Hans' case shows, webcams trained on everyday scenes aren't new: the first was set up in the early nineties to monitor the goings on around a kettle in a Cambridge lab. Our motivations to tune in probably haven't changed much either, judging from the analysis in this New York Times article from 2000.

In a 2003 paper anthropologist Daniel Miller observed how the web can harness the power of narrative much like soap opera. However, it can also make this narrative about 'real' people living simultaneous lives and thereby more compelling, much like reality TV. In a final development he saw the Internet's potential for interactive involvement by the user, elaborated in in his 2011 book 'Tales from Facebook' (p 73). He stressed how co-presence is established, reciprocity is possible and thereby relationships are formed, superseding the capacities of earlier media.

I am not sure he had inanimate objects and animals in mind as subjects but if reality TV could encompass the natural world with shows like 'Big Cat Diary', then why not take it to the next level online and start friending our four legged friends?

Wednesday, 9 February 2011

UCL hosted eminent (commercial) anthropologist and definitively NOT the inventor of the green photocopier button Lucy Suchman on Monday. Having tired of working at Xerox a while ago and now back in academia she turned her experience into a paper due to go to the ARA later this year. The thrust was that there is a poor fit between what anthropology/ethnography can offer and what a commercial ‘centre of innovation research’ expects in terms of deliverables.

Not me, guv

Her biggest gripe was with different understandings of innovation i.e. as discontinuous, transformative, centralisable and down to the efforts of a heroic designer vs. the reality of innovation as a gradualist, reproductive, contingent, distributed and collaborative process.

Check out ex Intel anthropologist Simon Roberts' blog, Ideas Bazaar, for another take on 'Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter', incidentally-on-purpose the title of an instructive book by Melissa Cefkin which looks at the pluses as well as minuses.